One Nation Under CCTV

“What kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the
hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. Something huge,
terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous
machines and terrifying weapons.” – George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four

It’s been a while since I opened up Photoshop for a bit of cheeky image editing, so here’s the latest experimental
result! This one depicts a very British dystopia. George Orwell
remains an infinitely quotable chap for this sort of subject, and I
highly recommend his thought-provoking literary works. 'Nineteen
Eighty Four' was a truly visionary undertaking – it foreshadowed the
concept of a surveillance society long before the development of
modern day technologies that would make it all possible.

Britain is leading the world when it comes to CCTV. It has one and a half times as many surveillance cameras as
communist China. The exact number of them in the UK is not known but
an estimate in 2002 counted the figure at well over four million. The
methodology of collecting such statistics is rather vague but
reasonable research suggests that our country now has one camera for
every 14 people.

The security infrastructure being created, whilst valid in many
respects, presents a plethora of worrying possibilities. The coupling
of CCTV cameras with facial recognition algorithms that track people
through crowds, read registration plates and log all this data for
future use is handy for current civil enforcement but leaves the door
open for the state of the future to have profound levels of control
over society.

(Thanks go to Richard Dawkins and the editors of Boing Boing for using
the image to illustrate this article and sending lots of visitors here as a result.)

A very cool photoshopping job and a sad fact. It seems that the UK government is freaked out by what they think their subordinates might be up to. Sick, somehow.And even sicker, that so many other governments want to imitate yours :-(

I had exactly the same impression on our visit to England. Cameras everywhere, even on the old facades in the charming Cotswold villages. Not that I had anything to hide...Last month I talked to an English expatriate who said that wasn't her impression. But she's been living here in New York for a long time.Cool image, by the way!